degree of doctor of laws, and henceforth resided in London and entered upon the duties of a practising civilian.

He had now reached the age of thirty four years, eighteen of which had been most happily and profitably spent in a well-regulated course of discipline and study at the university, in the society of scholars, amid scenes enriched by time-hallowed associations. It was here that he acquired that rich and ripe scholarship and that taste for polite literature, which always held a divided empire with his profession over his mind, and which subsequently gave to his legal opinions that attic elegance and curious felicity of style, which made them studied as models of composition, as well as for their profound and luminous exposition of important legal principles. The laurels he had won at. the university bore also golden fruit, and from the proceeds of his fellowship and the receipts from his private pupils, he had already acquired a liberal competence, and was saved that wasting "sickness of the heart," which so often accompanies the early struggles of professional men. We cannot wonder that during his whole life, he never became thoroughly weaned from his alma mater, and that his greatest pleasure was to shake the dust of the courts from his shoes, and recreate himself in the shady retreats of his beloved Oxford.

Upon his coming to London, Dr. Scott by no means buried himself in the dark recesses of Doctors' Commons, but combined the pleasures of literature and society with the toils of business and the dry pursuits of law, and like lord Mansfield, a kindred spirit, "drank champagne with the wits." As is well known to the readers of that most amusing book, Boswell's Life of Johnson, he became a member of that distinguished circle of men of letters, which moved, planetlike, around the great central luminary, and was chosen a member of the Literary Club, an honor which he owed as much probably to his convivial talents as to his literary

reputation. He relates an amusing instance of Dr. Johnson's intolerance, who rebuked him sharply as they were riding together in a post-chaise, for presuming to have a head-ache, saying to him, "At your age, sir, I had no headache." He was one of the executors of Dr. Johnson's will, in conjunction with sir John Hawkins and sir Joshua Reynolds. His duties as executor involved him in a controversy with the testy Dr. Parr, upon the subject of the epitaph on Dr. Johnson, from which he extricated himself with great tact.

He came very soon into possession of a very lucrative business, and wealth and honors crowded rapidly upon him. In 1783, he was appointed register of the court of faculties, and, in 1788, was selected by the bishop of London to be judge of the consistory court, and in the same year was advanced to the lucrative office of advocate general and knighted. In 1790, he was chosen to the situation of master of the faculties, and in 1798 was created judge of the high court of admiralty. In 1790, he became a member of parliament, and continued a member for thirty-two years, the latter part of the time being one of the representatives for the university of Oxford. He was never distinguished as a parliamentary speaker. He entered the house at too late a period in life to feel himself entirely at ease in so new and strange a sphere. The natural gentleness and sensitiveness of his temperament was also increased by the constraint imposed upon him by his judicial station. Good taste dictated to him to abstain from the discussion of violent party questions, which a judge could hardly touch without soiling the purity of his ermine. He spoke but seldom, and whenever he did, he was listened to with great respect and his opinions carried with them the weight due to his high legal reputation. In politics, he was always a stanch tory and an enemy to reform, and was the especial defender and champion of the rights and privileges of the church of England.

It is as a judge, that he has left behind him the most enduring memorials, and it is by his judicial opinions alone, that his great powers can be fairly estimated. He was appointed, as we have seen, judge of the consistory court in the diocese of the bishop of London, in 1788, and he held this office till 1821. The consistory court is a spiritual court having cognizance of all ecclesiastical matters arising within the diocese, and exercises jurisdiction as a probate court, whenever the party deceased has no assets out of the diocese. Some of the opinions delivered by sir William Scott in this court have been preserved in the consistory reports of Haggard and Phillimore, and of these a few were carefully corrected and prepared for publication by his own hand. Most of these opinions were given in matrimonial causes, suits for separation and nullity of marriage, which were of a nature to call forth in a peculiar degree his moral dignity and elevation, and the taste and purity of his mind. Some of these judgments, especially those in the well-known cases of Evans v. Evans and Dalrymple v. Dalrymple, are superior to any thing of the kind in the language, whether we regard the chaste elegance of the style, the clearness of the reasoning, the force and distinctness with which the evidence is grasped and analyzed, the practical wisdom of the precepts, the searching good sense of the observations or the sound and high morality which breathes through the whole. We perceive in them at once the learning and wisdom of a great judge, the cultivation of a ripe and finished scholar, and the excellent good sense of one who had lived in the world without being corrupted by it, and who had learned by observation the strength and the weakness of humanity. It often fell to his lot to administer reproof and to give advice to married couples unwisely seeking to throw off the marriage yoke because they felt it chafe their necks a little; but in so doing he never overstepped the limits of good taste, and never wounded the most deli

cate sensitiveness; and though he was often obliged to discourse from hackneyed texts and to give obvious expositions of the relative duties growing out of the marriage uniɔn, yet such was the grace of the diction and so charming was the flow of his language, that the most familiar truths caught from his lips the beauty of novelty and sparkled with a lustre not their own. How full of good sense and how felicitous in expression are the following observations from his judgment in the case of Evans v. Evans :

"To vindicate the policy of the law is no necessary part of the office of a judge; but if it were, it would not be difficult to show that the law in this respect has acted with its usual wisdom and humanity, with that true wisdom, and that real humanity, that regards the general interests of mankind. For though in particular cases, the repugnance of the law to dissolve the obligations of matrimonial cohabitation may operate with great severity upon individuals; yet it must be carefully remembered, that the general happiness of the married life is secured by its indissolubility. When people understand that they must live together, except for a very few reasons known to the law, they learn to soften by mutual accommodation that yoke which they know they cannot shake off; they become good husbands, and good wives, from the necessity of remaining husbands and wives; for necessity is a powerful master in teaching the duties which it imposes. If it were once understood, that upon mutual disgust married persons might be legally separated, many couples, who now pass through the world with mutual comfort, with attention to their common offspring and to the moral order of civil society, might have been at this moment living in a state of mutual unkindness—in a state of estrangement from their common offspring-and in a state of the most licentious and unreserved immorality. In this case, as in many others, the happiness of some individuals must be sacrificed to the greater and more general good.

"What merely wounds the mental feelings is in few cases to be admitted, where they are not accompanied with bodily injury, either actual or menaced. Mere austerity of temper, petulance of

manners, rudeness of language, a want of civil attention and accommodation, even occasional sallies of passion, if they do not threaten bodily harm, do not amount to legal cruelty: they are high moral offences in the marriage-state undoubtedly, not innocent surely in any state of life, but still they are not that cruelty against which the law can relieve. Under such misconduct of either of the parties, for it may exist on the one side as well as on the other, the suffering party must bear in some degree the consequences of an injudicious connexion; must subdue by decent resistance or by prudent conciliation; and if this cannot be done, both must suffer in silence. And if it be complained that by this inactivity of the courts, much injustice may be suffered, and much misery produced, the answer is, that courts of justice do not pretend to furnish cures for all the miseries of human life. They redress or punish gross violations of duty, but they go no farther; they cannot make men virtuous; and, as the happiness of the world depends upon its virtue, there may be much unhappiness in it which human laws cannot undertake to remove.

"Still less is it cruelty, where it wounds not the natural feelings, but the acquired feelings arising from particular rank and situation; for the court has no scale of sensibilities, by which it can guage the quantum of injury done and felt; and therefore, though the court will not absolutely exclude considerations of that sort, where they are stated merely as matter of aggravation, yet they cannot constitute cruelty where it would not otherwise have existed; of course, the denial of little indulgences and particular accommodations, which the delicacy of the world is apt to number amongst its necessaries, is not cruelty. It may, to be sure, be a harsh thing to refuse the use of a carriage, or the use of a servant; it may in many cases be extremely unhandsome, extremely disgraceful to the character of the husband; but the ecclesiastical court does not look to such matters: the great ends of marriage may very well be carried on without them; and if people will quarrel about such matters, and which they certainly may do in many cases with a great deal of acrimony, and sometimes with much reason, they yet must decide such matters as well as they can in their own domestic forum.